Ep. 1814 - Country Music Is Absolutely DOMINATING. Here's Why.

A couple of months ago, we delivered the obituary for rock music, a genre that was never gonna survive the post-Obama cultural shifts in America, which punish experimentation and risk-taking, as well as anything that's important, you know, to white people generally, while rewarding manufactured solo acts that are easier to market on social media and also much easier to manage and control.

There's no doubt that the death of rock is a bad sign.

And you might even call it a leading indicator of cultural decay in this country.

Now, of course, some people, some conservatives especially, might argue that rock music itself was a driver of cultural decay, and in some cases they might be right.

But generally speaking, rock was, still is, where you can find it, um, a truly great art form in my view.

And more than that, it is an American art form.

Rock was both a product of American culture and a producer of American culture.

Each decade, going back to the '50s, saw a new stage in the evolution of the genre, reflecting changes and shifts in the culture at large.

Whether it was the prog rock and heavy metal and arena rock of the '70s, or the new wave and hair metal of the '80s, or the alt rock and grunge of the '90s and so on, you can go back and listen to the rock music of a particular decade and come away with a better understanding of the cultural mood of that time.

Now, our current decade, as we talked about, is arguably the first in 70 years that doesn't have its own unique rock sound, which is not a good thing, I would quite emphatically argue.

It's yet another symptom of an exhausted, decadent culture with no new ideas and basically nothing left to say.

Now, that said, there are some subgenres of rock that, while not often producing huge mainstream hits, um, although sometimes they do, are still churning out great music nonetheless.

Folk rock is one of those subgenres, one of my favorites.

And I say that really just as a way, since we're talking about music, to wedge in a mention of Glen Hansard, who's one of the great folk rock and singer-songwriter musicians of our time, who just sadly died in a motorcycle accident yesterday.

He starred in a, a movie called Once back in 2007 that, if you consider it a musical, and I do, is one of the only musicals that I ever personally enjoyed.

Uh, he was a great artist, and if you're not familiar with him, you should go look him up as soon as this show is over.

So that's your homework.

But any case, while rock has fallen on hard times, along with a number of other once thriving musical genres, it's not all bad news.

There is another traditional American genre that is somehow thriving right now, and it's worth thinking about how it has managed to succeed in an environment that has all but destroyed so many other forms of music.

Uh, this is the counterbalancing narrative to the decline of rock, and it is, dare I say, uh, as I would rarely say, a cause for some optimism.

Which is that as rock has faded, country music is now dominating the charts.

And this is a resurgence that's, uh, n- not entirely new.

It's been building for several years now.

You can make the case that, though, that country music is now the strongest it's ever been, certainly in terms of its popularity relative to other genres, that's for sure.

Uh, Ella Langley's Choosin' Texas has now spent 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, um, which is a record for a female solo act, excluding holiday releases.